Memento Mori
by Wallace
Summary: Centuries ahead, the last BtVS character broods.


Disclaimer: Not mine.  
  
1 Memento Mori  
  
  
  
People change, he said.  
  
We're not people, I told him. I hated that bastard. Three hundred years together, and we never stopped hating each other, but we kept the truce, because there was no-one else for either of us.  
  
I never told him he was right.  
  
We all change. We all get to make decisions. Today I made probably the biggest of my existence.  
  
She came back, you see. Five hundred years, and she came back.  
  
I shouldn't have been surprised, thinking about it. Her Angel was long dead, and I was bad again, and the Slayer was dead. Pretty well everything that had ever been wrong between us, and it was all gone.  
  
I never met the Master. The previous one, I mean. I'm told he was bat- ugly, but then he was older than me.  
  
I wonder if he could have done the things I have done.  
  
Five weeks ago I killed my third Slayer. She called me 'foul hellspawn', and reckoned Vampires were a 'vile plague on humanity'. Sounds like the Watchers have already forgotten Angel, then.  
  
I've always rejoiced in my evil. Through four hundred years of Watching in impotence I always maintained my evil, at least to him. He never argued. All his dreams had died with the Slayer, but he allowed me mine. I dreamed that one day I would have the chip removed, and I did. It still hurts, for some reason - probably permanent brain damage - but I can ignore it well enough to beat a Slayer.  
  
That was another dream, killing the Slayer. Of course, it wasn't the one I killed last month, not in my dreams. I hated and I loved and I dreamed of her death, and that's what made this one so easy. As we fought, my minions holding back at my command, I remembered the other one, and how we used to dance together. This one wasn't her. I thought of Buffy, and the rest was almost too easy.  
  
Her blood tasted of failure.  
  
The others were impressed. I overcame my chip and made myself ruler of the worlds biggest, most dangerous city, and they simply regarded me as another Master. I made it safe to walk the streets of New York - at least if you can ignore the radiation - and humans and vampires alike called me a menace. I survived six centuries of conflict, unnoticed. And then I killed some half-trained slip of a girl, with her heart full of arrogance and her head full of lies - and then they admire me.  
  
Jason said something to me just before she came back today. He said to me, 'We are the Legions of Hell, and you are our General.' Stupid bastard. We're vampires. Murderous, irrational bastards, yes, demons, maybe, but soldiers? I asked him who was our enemy, then, and he said, the humans. I thought I trained him better than that. I asked him if Napoleon was in the habit of lining his men up and having them fire volleys at the bullock train, then.  
  
Now bullfighters, there's a better parallel. We kill them for sport, and we eat them for food, but we don't set out to destroy them. She never understood that, still didn't.  
  
After they put the chip in my head I could only dream of evil. I wanted just three things. The first was to escape the chip, and the second was to kill the Slayer - Buffy - and the third was that if I did those things then one day she would come back.  
  
Well, Drusilla came back today, just walked into the building and headed for my rooms. She was alone, but then that's just like her - she doesn't really care about anything.  
  
I like to think that I was the exception.  
  
What I did today was no small thing. She was my sire, and she was my lover for over a century, and she was my beloved for far longer.  
  
She didn't say anything when I killed her. She just looked at me as she crumbled and the minions stared. I told Jason to have someone clean the mess up, and he did, but he collected her dust. He's a bright one, though I don't know whether his reasons for doing so are to give her to me, use her in bargaining, or even to attempt to bring her back. I'll know soon enough. The Master knows everything that happens in his realm.  
  
And that's who I am now. It wasn't just Drusilla who died today, you see. She was the last of them - the oldest vampire in the world, and I was next, and the next after us has less than two centuries on him. With Angel helping them the Slayers were truly effective.  
  
And now there's no one else but me who remembers the name 'Spike'. William Sanger died in a London alleyway over six hundred years ago, and William the Bloody finally vanished when I killed my second Slayer over a hundred years after that, and then there was only Spike.  
  
No one knows what the previous Master's real name was. Oh, there are probably records of him under that name, but there's no way to link them, no way to be sure who he was.  
  
And now there's no one who knows the Master's name again. William the bloody is forgotten. Today, the person I once was vanished along with the last of his dreams. I am the Master, ruler of New York, a king of vampires in a world where we are known and feared.  
  
Spike is dead. 


End file.
